Service Availability Management

Service Availability Assurance
CPT’s experience of 20 years as a provider of specialist capacity, performance and testing services, has illustrated the increasingly complex challenges that IT organisations face introducing change into production environments. CPT has been involved in a number of situations where the application is live and not performing, or undergoing development/testing where concerns have been raised leading to our involvement as an organisation to solve the problems.Our technical consultants are often seen as IT ‘fire-fighters’ specialising in resolving performance and stability issues, often when:

A problem has reached crisis point,

Internal and vendor efforts to resolve the issues have failed,

BUT preferably as early as possible to ensure pro-activeness.

As a consequence CPT is exposed to diverse problems, clients, and environments containing varied technology combinations. In these situations, typically we find that the problems are caused by one or more of the following :

Business Pressure resulting in :

A rush to get new applications and changes in to production

Minimal or no design considerations for performance and scalability

Limited understanding of the characteristics of underpinning technologies

Inadequate Non-Functional Testing (Stress / Performance etc.)

Poor capacity planning and modelling

Poor communication between groups

Conflicts, internally and externally

SILOS of activity (can be particularly prevalent with out-sourcing either application development or infrastructure services)

Without an assurance framework, the cost of mitigating and remedying risks increases progressively in the SDLC.

The CPT methodology is to identify the problems as early as possible in the SDLC and to resolve the problems before they get anywhere close to the production environment, or devise mitigation strategies to accompany them into production. The later the problems appear and remain in the SDLC the greater the cost to remedy them and the greater the risk to the production environment and to the end user experience.

CPT brings to the table experienced consultants, all with a focus on performance, capacity, testing and designing for optimal stability, reliability and efficiency in the destination environment under the projected volumes of transactions.

CPT’s Service Design Package describes the information required to deliver and manage a Business Service for a client either utilising the organisation’s own resources or via an external service provider.

The Service Design Package is developed through a series of collaborative workshops with key stakeholders to define the following information about the Business Service:

Service ownership

Service requirements specification: specifies in more detail what conditions the new service and its underlying applications and infrastructure must fulfil, providing all information which is needed for building the new service

Service operation and improvement: details how the service will be operated and continually improved, including the associated responsibilities, and what is required

Service transition: details what must be done to meet the specified requirements during service transition

CPT Global is a specialist IT consulting services company with operations in Australia, North and South America, Europe and Asia. Listed on the Australian stock exchange (ASX:CGO), CPT is a market leader in the provision of Capacity Planning,
Performance Tuning, Testing and Digital Consulting Services.